Recently in Links of Interest Category

It's March 1, and spring approaches. What was I thinking about in the previous 10 years on this date? Since my blog is now old enough, we can find out:

• 2001: I had just re-joined my old band.
• 2002: I highlighted some of the websites I worked on, and an online style guide I didn't.
• 2003: I waited a few days, then spewed out stuff about digital cameras, earplugs, software piracy, cheap pens, and the Editors' Association of Canada.
• 2004: I went on one of my regular rants about how human brains misunderstand statistics.
• 2005: I marked the death of Jef Raskin, irascible pioneer of computer interfaces.
• 2006: The bizarre and unlamented iPod Hi-Fi, women in science, and the Internet as oxygen.
• 2007: I learned a good lesson about painkillers.
• 2008: I almost passed out in a messy and embarrassing way.
• 2009: A fantastic drive to Tofino on Vancouver Island.
• 2010: The fun-yet-schockingly-lame 2010 Olympic Closing Ceremony.

It's unlikely I'll live until March 1 next year, so that list should now be complete.

Never mind what I've written here recently. These three pieces are far more fascinating, so read them first:

• Neal Stephenson (via Kottke) reveals why we're still using rockets to send things into space, when more efficient ways could be developed. (Quick summary: blame Hitler.)
  
  
• John Baez (also via Kottke) discusses four great and important catastrophes in the history of the Earth: the formation of the Moon by a collision with another planet 4.53 billion years ago; the Late Heavy Bombardment of the Earth's surface, probably because of gravitational interactions between Jupiter and Saturn between 4 and 3.8 billion years ago; the poisoning of our atmosphere by oxygen after plants evolved photosynthesis 2.5 billion years ago; and the "snowball Earth" global glaciation 850 million years ago.
  
  
• Pioneering podcaster Doug Kaye visited Egypt as a tourist and just got back: somehow he and his wife just threaded the needle of having a completely uneventful Egyptian vacation and being embroiled in the current political turmoil. They witnessed quite a bit, without being in danger themselves. It's quite a story.

Yesterday was another side effect hell, but I managed to visit a few websites in bed between trips to the bathroom:

• "Even after all these other factors, including education, are taken into account, atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons still outperform all the other religious groups in our survey [of knowledge about world religions]." (I managed 14 out of 15.)
  
  
• The Prime Meridian line at the Royal Naval Observatory in Greenwich, U.K., actually is red, like on maps.
  
  
• "But given the current arrangements, I'm being charged just a little bit less than I pay for paper and getting a whole lot less, and it just doesn't feel like a good deal. Of course, a setup like I'm proposing would leave the publishing industry as we know it in ruins. Which wouldn't bother me in the slightest as long as the authors and editors can still get paid."
  
  
• "Maybe death is a good time to go offline."
  
  
• "But recent budgets have shown a carbon tax deficit: tax cuts have completely swamped carbon tax revenues. While some were concerned that the carbon tax would be a 'tax grab', instead we [have] a carbon tax is that is revenue negative not revenue neutral."
  
  
• "Perhaps 25,000 years ago, a child visited the cave and left a footprint, the oldest human footprint that can be accurately dated."
  
  
• "See, aspiring thief, you just never know what you're stepping into when you hit up a random car on a random street. However badass you think you may be, there is someone on the other side of the robbery. And in this particular case it was someone who escaped the Iranian Revolution as a child; who roamed the world alone for five years because her parents couldn't get out; who watched from a dozen blocks away as the twin towers crumbled; who had just barely clawed her way out of that concentration camp known as late-stage cancer, if only because she was intent on raising her babies, come hell or high water. And all of this before she even turned 40. Can you see how that someone might be way more twisted than you?"
  
  
• I don't buy lottery tickets. Why? Here's a simple lottery simulator, using the U.S. Mega Millions Lottery scheme—but many others, like our Lotto 6/49, are similar. I simulated playing the same numbers twice a week for 10 years. I "won" a total of $50 in that time, "spending" $1040, for a net loss of $990.
  
  
• Worst oil company print ads ever?
  
  
• Charlie Brooker's How to Report the News (video) and Martin Robbins's This is a News Website Article About a Scientific Paper. Those cheeky Brits. And damn if they aren't completely right.
  
  
• "At its best, science fiction can help people better understand science, explaining new ideas and theories in the context of a thrilling, gripping story. And then there are these 10 utterly ridiculous stories about evolution."
  
  
• "To accept something like residential cancer clusters are often just coincidence is deeply unsatisfying. The powerlessness, the feeling you are defenseless to the whims of chance, can be assuaged by singling out an antagonist. Sometimes you need a bad guy, and The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy is one way you can create one."

• Since he lost the ability to talk or eat, Roger Ebert has turned into one of the world's best bloggers. (He did win a Pulitzer Prize decades ago, after all.) Here he is writing about his new face.
• Why fixed (non-zoom) lenses take better pictures, and let you carry less while doing so.
• Dave Olson's wonderful video from Northern Voice 2010. (He couldn't attend in person because of surgery. I know what that's like.)
• Nick Curran plays the best off-the-hook Little Richard–style rock 'n' roll since the 1950s.
• The sexiest CPR instructional video ever.
• U.S. baby boomers grew up in a time of remarkably low immigration, and that affects their attitudes now.
• Dr. Fritz Sennheiser, who changed the world of headphones, has died.
• The frighteningly ugly new London 2012 Olympic mascots fit right in with the Power Rangers.
• I've started using Google's free embeddable web fonts on this website.
• Nikon's 10 best lenses (actually, it's 12). Also, the company's worst lenses.
• A "thank you BP" cake.
• The Twitter spelling test.
• "Markets did not clean up smog in Los Angeles or bring Lake Erie back to a semblance of life or rescue the California condor from extinction." Indeed, "Political philosophy can never be free of history."
• The Swinger takes any song and makes it all jazzy and swingy, sometimes with hilarious results (such as with Metallica).
• The Big Caption is often poignant or funny. This one made the rounds last week (beware: swearing).
• The evolution of the camera.
• "Microsoft, despite J Allard's best efforts, never went native, never really figured out how be part of [Internet] culture."
• Even if you work full-time, you probably spend more time with your kids than your grandparents did with theirs.
• How the CEO of "identity-protection" site LifeLock had his own identity stolen 13 times (!).

• Really, really, really big sand art. No really, it's big.
• Of all the things the MythBusters have blown up, I still like the water heater rocket demolishing the little red house the best—especially the slo-mo around 2:40 (video).
• It's a bit of a puzzle why matter and antimatter didn't entirely annihilate one another in the early Universe. But there are clues now about why there was matter left over—enough to make everything that now exists, including you and me.
• Greta Christina wonders why anyone is still Catholic. She also wonders what it means to be age-appropriate in choosing clothes.
• A wonderful skateboarding video that satirizes skateboarding videos and yet has a delightful fun charm all its own.
• Microsoft Research combines many frames of fairly crappy video to make a pretty nice still image.
• Eight websites you need to stop building.
• Neko Case absolutely kills it with her live version of Harry Nilsson's "Don't Forget Me." Made me cry (video).
• World War II as a Facebook news feed.
• Why does the Moon look bigger at the horizon, when it's not?
• Octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish—although they are molluscs like clams and slugs—are "honourary vertebrates" as far as the U.K.'s animal cruelty laws are concerned.
• Love the name of this Bollywood-themed live comedy show: "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter Chicken."
• How do you know when a rabid, virulent, anti-gay activist is in fact gay? The answer is, "Well, duh!" (video).
• Facebook's eroding privacy policy: a timeline.
• Ten amazing truths you already suspected.
• An L.A. resident found a highway sign confusing, so he sneaked up and fixed it himself. His helpful alteration remained in place for almost ten years.
• Great ongoing coverage of the Deepwater Horizon oil blowout disaster by the gCaptain blog.
• Eleven music superstars who are technically one-hit wonders (includes Hendrix, Garth Brooks, Rush, and Iggy Pop).
• We carry Neanderthal genes.

In case you haven't been following my Twitter feed. You can also look at some of my older entries like this one.

• The Nicli Antica Pizzeria will finally bring proper Neapolitan-style pizza to Vancouver.
• People want sofas, not "machines for living." The same for software.
• Turn any website into a horrifying 1999-era Geocities site with Geocitiesizer. Here's this site.
• A moving soul tribute to the Hubble Space Telescope (video).
• Wearing polarized sunglasses can make you think your iPhone, iPad, or laptop has a broken screen, when it doesn't.
• Why can't all alarm clocks be like this one?
• Twenty years after the online magazine TidBITS started, here are the stories of how some of the staffers got there. (TidBITS was apparently the first Internet publication to accept advertising, incidentally.)
• Fifty awesome R&B, funk, and soul records that were samples to launch a gazillion hip-hop tracks.
• Photos of the last launch of the space shuttle Atlantis. Check out this shot of Atlantis over the Canary Islands too.
• The original Law & Order TV show has been cancelled after 20 years. Some claim that with declining crime rates, there are more murders portrayed on the three Law & Order programs each year than actually occur in Manhattan during that time.
• "Slowly disintegrating [Facebook's] social context without choice isn't consent; it's trickery."
• If you've never tried lutefisk (also known as lipeäkala), don't. It's a Scandinavian "delicacy" consisting of whitefish boiled in lye. Even bacteria won't eat it. It's one reason I'm convinced that many delicacies originate in desperation.
• Bagpipes are pretty rare in rock 'n' roll songs. Here are the best rock bagpipes ever (video).
• Everything bad about Canada in one photo.
• It seems that some people think that dust flecks illuminated by camera flashes are the souls of the dead. Seriously.
• The honey badger is the world's most fearless animal. There's video of one trying to eat a poisonous puff adder, getting bitten and knocked out for two hours, then waking up and finishing the snake off. Yikes.
• Here's a way to feel inadequate: a 16-year-old Australian girl just sailed around the world by herself.
• Inappropriate jazz hands.
• Holy crap does Google own a lot of servers.